ABSTRACT
Narratives are how humans understand their lived experiences; research consistently demonstrates gender differences in personal narratives, across broad cultural and socioeconomic groups, especially in the expression of emotion. We show how gendered narratives are modeled and socialized within family interactions that begin at birth and evolve across childhood and adolescence. Using coding of emotion in narratives provided by middle-class Western participants, our review highlights issues of developmental and individual differences within and across gender, and we examine how gender identity and emotional reactivity influence the expression of emotion in personal narratives.
